Chapter 6
Mrs. Bittacy had never liked their present home. She preferred a flat, more open country that left approaches clear. She liked to see things coming. This cottage on the very edge of the old hunting grounds of William the Conqueror had never satisfied her ideal of a safe and pleasant place to settle down in. The sea-coast, with treeless downs behind and a clear horizon in front, as at Eastbourne, say, was her ideal of a proper home.
It was curious, this instinctive aversion she felt to being shut in–by trees especially; a kind of claustrophobia almost; probably due, as has been said, to the days in India when the trees took her husband off and surrounded him with dangers. In those weeks of solitude the feeling had matured. She had fought it in her fashion, but never conquered it. Apparently routed, it had a way of creeping back in other forms. In this particular case, yielding to his strong desire, she thought the battle won, but the terror of the trees came back before the first month had passed. They laughed in her face.
She never lost knowledge of the fact that the leagues of forest lay about their cottage like a mighty wall, a crowding, watching, listening presence that shut them in from freedom and escape. Far from morbid naturally, she did her best to deny the thought, and so simple and unartificial was her type of mind that for weeks together she would wholly lose it. Then, suddenly it would return upon her with a rush of bleak reality. It was not only in her mind; it existed apart from any mere mood; a separate fear that walked alone; it came and went, yet when it went–went only to watch her from another point of view. It was in abeyance–hidden round the corner.
The Forest never let her go completely. It was ever ready to encroach. All the branches, she sometimes fancied, stretched one way–towards their tiny cottage and garden, as though it sought to draw them in and merge them in itself. Its great, deep-breathing soul resented the mockery, the insolence, the irritation of the prim garden at its very gates. It would absorb and smother them if it could. And every wind that blew its thundering message over the huge sounding-board of the million, shaking trees conveyed the purpose that it had. They had angered its great soul. At its heart was this deep, incessant roaring.
All this she never framed in words, the subtleties of language lay far beyond her reach. But instinctively she felt it; and more besides. It troubled her profoundly. Chiefly, moreover, for her husband. Merely for herself, the nightmare might have left her cold. It was David’s peculiar interest in the trees that gave the special invitation. Jealousy, then, in its most subtle aspect came to strengthen this aversion and dislike, for it came in a form that no reasonable wife could possibly object to. Her husband’s passion, she reflected, was natural and inborn. It had decided his vocation, fed his ambition, nourished his dreams, desires, hopes. All his best years of active life had been spent in the care and guardianship of trees. He knew them, understood their secret life and nature, “managed” them intuitively as other men “managed” dogs and horses. He could not live for long away from them without a strange,
acute nostalgia that stole his peace of mind and consequently his strength of body. A forest made him happy and at peace; it nursed and fed and soothed his deepest moods. Trees influenced the sources of his life, lowered or raised the very heart-beat in him. Cut off from them he languished as a lover of the sea can droop inland, or a mountaineer may pine in the flat monotony of the plains.
This she could understand, in a fashion at least, and make allowances for. She had yielded gently, even sweetly, to his choice of their English home; for in the little island there is nothing that suggests the woods of wilder countries so nearly as the New Forest. It has the genuine air and mystery, the depth and splendor, the loneliness, and there and there the strong, untamable quality of old-time forests as Bittacy of the Department knew them.
In a single detail only had he yielded to her wishes. He consented to a cottage on the edge, instead of in the heart of it. And for a dozen years now they had dwelt in peace and happiness at the lips of this great spreading thing that covered so many leagues with its tangle of swamps and moors and splendid ancient trees.
Only with the last two years or so–with his own increasing age, and physical decline perhaps–had come this marked growth of passionate interest in the welfare of the Forest. She had watched it grow, at first had laughed at it, then talked sympathetically so far as sincerity permitted, then had argued mildly, and finally come to realize that its treatment lay altogether beyond her powers, and so had come to fear it with all her heart.
The six weeks they annually spent away from their English home, each regarded very differently, of course. For her husband it meant a painful exile that did his health no good; he yearned for his trees–the sight and sound and smell of them; but for herself it meant release from a haunting dread–escape. To renounce those six weeks by the sea on the sunny, shining coast of France, was almost more than this little woman, even with her unselfishness, could face.
After the first shock of the announcement, she reflected as deeply as her nature permitted, prayed, wept in secret–and made up her mind. Duty, she felt clearly, pointed to renouncement. The discipline would certainly be severe–she did not dream at the moment how severe!–but this fine, consistent little Christian saw it plain; she accepted it, too, without any sighing of the martyr, though the courage she showed was of the martyr order. Her husband should never know the cost. In all but this one passion his unselfishness was ever as great as her own. The love she had borne him all these years, like the love she bore her anthropomorphic deity, was deep and real. She loved to suffer for them both. Besides, the way her husband had put it to her was singular. It did not take the form of a mere selfish predilection. Something higher than two wills in conflict seeking compromise was in it from the beginning.
“I feel, Sophia, it would be really more than I could manage,” he said slowly, gazing into the fire over the tops of his stretched-out muddy boots. “My duty and my happiness lie here with the Forest and with you. My life is deeply rooted in this place. Something I can’t define connects my inner being with these trees, and separation would make me ill–might even kill me. My hold on life would weaken; here is my source of supply. I cannot explain it better than that.” He looked up steadily into her face across the table so that she saw the gravity of his expression and the shining of his steady eyes.
“David, you feel it as strongly as that!” she said, forgetting the tea things altogether.
“Yes,” he replied, “I do. And it’s not of the body only, I feel it in my soul.”
The reality of what he hinted at crept into that shadow-covered room like an actual Presence and stood beside them. It came not by the windows or the door, but it filled the entire space between the walls and ceiling. It took the heat from the fire before her face. She felt suddenly cold, confused a little, frightened. She almost felt the rush of foliage in the wind. It stood between them.
“There are things–some things,” she faltered, “we are not intended to know, I think.” The words expressed her general attitude to life, not alone to this particular incident.
And after a pause of several minutes, disregarding the criticism as though he had not heard it–“I cannot explain it better than that, you see,” his grave voice answered. “There is this deep, tremendous link,–some secret power they emanate that keeps me well and happy and–alive. If you cannot understand, I feel at least you may be able to–forgive.” His tone grew tender, gentle, soft. “My selfishness, I know, must seem quite unforgivable. I cannot help it somehow; these trees, this ancient Forest, both seem knitted into all that makes me live, and if I go–“
There was a little sound of collapse in his voice. He stopped abruptly, and sank back in his chair. And, at that, a distinct lump came up into her throat which she had great difficulty in managing while she went over and put her arms about him.
“My dear,” she murmured, “God will direct. We will accept His guidance. He has always shown the way before.”
“My selfishness afflicts me–” he began, but she would not let him finish.
“David, He will direct. Nothing shall harm you. You’ve never once been selfish, and I cannot bear to hear you say such things. The way will open that is best for you–for both of us.” She kissed him, she would not let him speak; her heart was in her throat, and she felt for him far more than for herself.
And then he had suggested that she should go alone perhaps for a shorter time, and stay in her brother’s villa with the children, Alice and Stephen. It was always open to her as she well knew.
“You need the change,” he said, when the lamps had been lit and the servant had gone out again; “you need it as much as I dread it. I could manage somehow until you returned, and should feel happier that way if you went. I cannot leave this Forest that I love so well. I even feel, Sophie dear”–he sat up straight and faced her as he half whispered it–“that I can never leave it again. My life and happiness lie here together.”
And eve while scorning the idea that she could leave him alone with the Influence of the Forest all about him to have its unimpeded way, she felt the pangs of that subtle jealousy bite keen and close. He loved the Forest better than herself, for he placed it first. Behind the words, moreover, hid the unuttered thought that made her so uneasy. The terror Sanderson had brought revived and shook its wings before her very eyes. For the whole conversation, of which this was a fragment, conveyed the unutterable implication that while he could not spare the trees, they equally could not spare him. The vividness with which he managed to conceal and yet betray the fact brought a profound distress that crossed the border between presentiment and warning into positive alarm.
He clearly felt that the trees would miss him–the trees he tended, guarded, watched over, loved.
“David, I shall stay here with you. I think you need me really,–don’t you?” Eagerly, with a touch of heart-felt passion, the words poured out.
“Now more than ever, dear. God bless you for you sweet unselfishness. And your sacrifice,” he added, “is all the greater because you cannot understand the thing that makes it necessary for me to stay.”
“Perhaps in the spring instead–” she said, with a tremor in the voice.
“In the spring–perhaps,” he answered gently, almost beneath his breath. “For they will not need me then. All the world can love them in the spring. It’s in the winter that they’re lonely and neglected. I wish to stay with them particularly then. I even feel I ought to–and I must.”
And in this way, without further speech, the decision was made. Mrs. Bittacy, at least, asked no more questions. Yet she could not bring herself to show more sympathy than was necessary. She felt, for one thing, that if she did, it might lead him to speak freely, and to tell her things she could not possibly bear to know. And she dared not take the risk of that.
Chapter 7
This was at the end of summer, but the autumn followed close. The conversation really marked the threshold between the two seasons, and marked at the same time the line between her husband’s negative and aggressive state. She almost felt she had done wrong to yield; he grew so bold, concealment all discarded. He went, that is, quite openly to the woods, forgetting all his duties, all his former occupations. He even sought to coax her to go with him. The hidden thing blazed out without disguise. And, while she trembled at his energy, she admired the virile passion he displayed. Her jealousy had long ago retired before her fear, accepting the second place. Her one desire now was to protect. The wife turned wholly mother.
He said so little, but–he hated to come in. From morning to night he wandered in the Forest; often he went out after dinner; his mind was charged with trees–their foliage, growth, development; their wonder, beauty, strength; their loneliness in isolation, their power in a herded mass. He knew the effect of every wind upon them; the danger from the boisterous north, the glory from the west, the eastern dryness, and the soft, moist tenderness that a south wind left upon their thinning boughs. He spoke all day of their sensations: how they drank the fading sunshine, dreamed in the moonlight, thrilled to the kiss of stars. The dew could bring them half the passion of the night, but frost sent them plunging beneath the ground to dwell with hopes of a later coming softness in their roots. They nursed the life they carried–insects, larvae, chrysalis–and when the skies above them melted, he spoke of them standing “motionless in an ecstasy of rain,” or in the noon of sunshine “self-poised upon their prodigy of shade.”
And once in the middle of the night she woke at the sound of his voice, and heard him–wide awake, not talking in his sleep–but talking towards the window where the shadow of the cedar fell at noon:
O art thou sighing for Lebanon In the long breeze that streams to thy delicious East? Sighing for Lebanon, Dark cedar;
and, when, half charmed, half terrified, she turned and called to him by name, he merely said–
“My dear, I felt the loneliness–suddenly realized it–the alien desolation of that tree, set here upon our little lawn in England when all her Eastern brothers call her in sleep.” And the answer seemed so queer, so “un-evangelical,” that she waited in silence till he slept again. The poetry passed her by. It seemed unnecessary and out of place. It made her ache with suspicion, fear, jealousy.
The fear, however, seemed somehow all lapped up and banished soon afterwards by her unwilling admiration of the rushing splendor of her husband’s state. Her anxiety, at any rate, shifted from the religious to the medical. She thought he might be losing his steadiness of mind a little. How often in her prayers she offered thanks for the guidance that had made her stay with him to help and watch is impossible to say. It certainly was twice a day.
She even went so far once, when Mr. Mortimer, the vicar, called, and brought with him a more or less distinguished doctor–as to tell the professional man privately some symptoms of her husband’s queerness. And his answer that there was “nothing he could prescribe for” added not a little to her sense of unholy bewilderment. No doubt Sir James had never been “consulted” under such unorthodox conditions before. His sense of what was becoming naturally overrode his acquired instincts as a skilled instrument that might help the race.
“No fever, you think?” she asked insistently with hurry, determined to get something from him.
“Nothing that I can deal with, as I told you, Madam,” replied the offended allopathic Knight.
Evidently he did not care about being invited to examine patients in this surreptitious way before a teapot on the lawn, chance of a fee most problematical. He liked to see a tongue and feel a thumping pulse; to know the pedigree and bank account of his questioner as well. It was most unusual, in abominable taste besides. Of course it was. But the drowning woman seized the only straw she could.
For now the aggressive attitude of her husband overcame her to the point where she found it difficult even to question him. Yet in the house he was so kind and gentle, doing all he could to make her sacrifice as easy as possible.
“David, you really are unwise to go out now. The night is damp and very chilly. The ground is soaked in dew. You’ll catch your death of cold.”
His face lightened. “Won’t you come with me, dear,–just for once? I’m only going to the corner of the hollies to see the beech that stands so lonely by itself.”
She had been out with him in the short dark afternoon, and they had passed that evil group of hollies where the gypsies camped. Nothing else would grow there, but the hollies thrive upon the stony soil.
“David, the beech is all right and safe.” She had learned his phraseology a little, made clever out of due season by her love. “There’s no wind to-night.”
“But it’s rising,” he answered, “rising in the east. I heard it in the bare and hungry larches. They need the sun and dew, and always cry out when the wind’s upon them from the east.”
She sent a short unspoken prayer most swiftly to her deity as she heard him say it. For every time now, when he spoke in this familiar, intimate way of the life of the trees, she felt a sheet of cold fasten tight against her very skin and flesh. She shivered. How could he possibly know such things?
Yet, in all else, and in the relations of his daily life, he was sane and reasonable, loving, kind and tender. It was only on the subject of the trees he seemed unhinged and queer. Most curiously it seemed that, since the collapse of the cedar they both loved, though in different fashion, his departure from the normal had increased. Why else did he watch them as a man might watch a sickly child? Why did he hunger especially in the dusk to catch their “mood of night” as he called it? Why think so carefully upon them when the frost was threatening or the wind appeared to rise?
As she put it so frequently now herself–How could he possibly know such things?
He went. As she closed the front door after him she heard the distant roaring in the Forest.
And then it suddenly struck her: How could she know them too?
It dropped upon her like a blow that she felt at once all over, upon body, heart and mind. The discovery rushed out from its ambush to overwhelm. The truth of it, making all arguing futile, numbed her faculties. But though at first it deadened her, she soon revived, and her being rose into aggressive opposition. A wild yet calculated courage like that which animates the leaders of splendid forlorn hopes flamed in her little person–flamed grandly, and invincible. While knowing herself insignificant and weak, she knew at the same time that power at her back which moves the worlds. The faith that filled her was the weapon in her hands, and the right by which she claimed it; but the spirit of utter, selfless sacrifice that characterized her life was the means by which she mastered its immediate use. For a kind of white and faultless intuition guided her to the attack. Behind her stood her Bible and her God.
How so magnificent a divination came to her at all may well be a matter for astonishment, though some clue of explanation lies, perhaps, in the very simpleness of her nature. At any rate, she saw quite clearly certain things; saw them in moments only–after prayer, in the still silence of the night, or when left alone those long hours in the house with her knitting and her thoughts–and the guidance which then flashed into her remained, even after the manner of its coming was forgotten.
They came to her, these things she saw, formless, wordless; she could not put them into any kind of language; but by the very fact of being uncaught in sentences they retained their original clear vigor.
Hours of patient waiting brought the first, and the others followed easily afterwards, by degrees, on subsequent days, a little and a little. Her husband had been gone since early morning, and had taken his luncheon with him. She was sitting by the tea things, the cups and teapot warmed, the muffins in the fender keeping hot, all ready for his return, when she realized quite abruptly that this thing which took him off, which kept him out so many hours day after day, this thing that was against her own little will and instincts–was enormous as the sea. It was no mere prettiness of single Trees, but something massed and mountainous. About her rose the wall of its huge opposition to the sky, its scale gigantic, its power utterly prodigious. What she knew of it hitherto as green and delicate forms waving and rustling in the winds was but, as it were the spray of foam that broke into sight upon the nearer edge of viewless depths far, far away. The trees, indeed, were sentinels set visibly about the limits of a camp that itself remained invisible. The awful hum and murmur of the main body in the distance passed into that still room about her with the firelight and hissing kettle. Out yonder–in the Forest further out–the thing that was ever roaring at the center was dreadfully increasing.
The sense of definite battle, too–battle between herself and the Forest for his soul–came with it. Its presentiment was as clear as though Thompson had come into the room and quietly told her that the cottage was surrounded. “Please, ma’am, there are trees come up about the house,” she might have suddenly announced. And equally might have heard her own answer: “It’s all right, Thompson. The main body is still far away.”
Immediately upon its heels, then, came another truth, with a close reality that shocked her. She saw that jealousy was not confined to the human and animal world alone, but ran though all creation. The Vegetable Kingdom knew it too. So-called inanimate nature shared it with the rest. Trees felt it. This Forest just beyond the window–standing there in the silence of the autumn evening across the little lawn–this Forest understood it equally. The remorseless, branching power that sought to keep exclusively for itself the thing it loved and needed, spread like a running desire through all its million leaves and stems and roots. In humans, of course, it was consciously directed; in animals it acted with frank instinctiveness; but in trees this jealousy rose in some blind tide of impersonal and unconscious wrath that would sweep opposition from its path as the wind sweeps powdered snow from the surface of the ice. Their number was a host with endless reinforcements, and once it realized its passion was returned the power increased…. Her husband loved the trees…. They had become aware of it…. They would take him from her in the end….
Then, while she heard his footsteps in the hall and the closing of the front door, she saw a third thing clearly;–realized the widening of the gap between herself and him. This other love had made it. All these weeks of the summer when she felt so close to him, now especially when she had made the biggest sacrifice of her life to stay by his side and help him, he had been slowly, surely–drawing away. The estrangement was here and now–a fact accomplished. It had been all this time maturing; there yawned this broad deep space between them. Across the empty distance she saw the change in merciless perspective. It revealed his face and figure, dearly-loved, once fondly worshipped, far on the other side in shadowy distance, small, the back turned from her, and moving while she watched–moving away from her.
They had their tea in silence then. She asked no questions, he volunteered no information of his day. The heart was big within her, and the terrible loneliness of age spread through her like a rising icy mist. She watched him, filling all his wants. His hair was untidy and his boots were caked with blackish mud. He moved with a restless, swaying motion that somehow blanched her cheek and sent a miserable shivering down her back. It reminded her of trees. His eyes were very bright.
He brought in with him an odor of the earth and forest that seemed to choke her and make it difficult to breathe; and–what she noticed with a climax of almost uncontrollable alarm–upon his face beneath the lamplight shone traces of a mild, faint glory that made her think of moonlight falling upon a wood through speckled shadows. It was his new-found happiness that shone there, a happiness uncaused by her and in which she had no part.
In his coat was a spray of faded yellow beech leaves. “I brought this from the Forest to you,” he said, with all the air that belonged to his little acts of devotion long ago. And she took the spray of leaves mechanically with a smile and a murmured “thank you, dear,” as though he had unknowingly put into her hands the weapon for her own destruction and she had accepted it.
And when the tea was over and he left the room, he did not go to his study, or to change his clothes. She heard the front door softly shut behind him as he again went out towards the Forest.
A moment later she was in her room upstairs, kneeling beside the bed–the side she slept on–and praying wildly through a flood of tears that God would save and keep him to her. Wind brushed the window panes behind her while she knelt.
